Hi Everyone,
Fall has finally arrived here in Portland bringing with it an end to 80 degree days and sunshine. I so love this change in season! In the past several weeks I’ve noticed two topics come up with my clients repeatedly–identification with a Story, and Projection of the conclusions of that Story out onto others. So, I thought I would discuss this more in the Empath Telecall; the next one is this Friday at noon pacific time. These two topics of so important because we create our lives through our Stories and our Beliefs, and we have so much external reinforcement of our Stories and Beliefs that they begin to feel like facts rather than something that we have control over and can personally change.
From the shaman’s perspective, once we get to know our Story, we can change it and use a different, more empowering story, which manifests our lives in a better way for us. Some of these disempowering stories become so embedded in our system that we need help digging out those stories and their beliefs. But once we understand our stories and our patterned way of thinking about ourselves, we gain more control of our lives. Empaths in general have a typical group of stories that we like to tell ourselves. We tend to have great imaginations and live in fantasy and romatic story, we tend to need rescuing (which leads to problems with personal responsibility), or we tend to waste time rescuing others (the flip side of the Drama Triangle), we tend to be perfectionists which leads us to be painfully self-conscious, and we tend to have tragic stories that lead us to concentrate on the past sorrowfully instead of move forward into our creativity. As we become healthy, we can change these stories around and gain strength and wisdom from them instead.
Most of us have experienced traumas or unhappy experiences in our past that stuck with us for so long, that they repeat themselves in our current life. We tend to interpret our current experience through these past experiences, and draw similar conclusions. In psychology, this is called projection. From the shaman perspective, however, projection is also a energetic and vibrational experience as well, meaning that we will in the literal plane draw to us the players that we need to play out the roles in our particular story and make it very easy to project. If we have a pattern that plays out repeatedly, the shaman can help dismantle it, and teach the client how to recognize the pattern and the typical projection that comes with it. This is hard hard personal work because when each of us project unconsciously, it seems like the world is the way it is, rather than it originating from us–it is a blind spot for us, although it might be quite obvious what the blindspot is for others looking in! But from the shaman perspective, each of us is the source of our reality, and each of us is responsible for everything that we create.
This is both frightening and empowering, because it means that by changing our internal world, we can change our literal external world for the better. All we need to do is start with ourselves and our own innerworld. This is good news for the Empath who loves looking at the innerworld, but it is also a challenge. Some of our most powerful patterns come from our family system. We take on our role in the family and the belief system, and if we do not become conscious, that belief system can so run our lives that we do not have much choice in how our lives unfold. However, breaking out of a family belief system can be incredibly painful and confusing, depending on how unhealthy the belief system was for us, and how ingrained our family members will still be in holding it together. The pull from these types of patterns can literally feel like they have a life force all their own.
If you’d like to learn more, or share your personal experiences with these topics, please feel free to join me on Friday, or write to me here on my blog. Here’s to doing the personal work in order to live a happy and free life!
much love,
Elaine